The brazenly recorded and uploaded videos of lynchings have been blamed on a number of reasons but most recently on rumours of child kidnappings that have spread via WhatsApp.
Fake news has become a politically and culturally charged term globally.
It is today both a carefully used tool to spread misinformation all over the world to win the war of perception and sometimes elections. And also an uncaged beast, that often tramples heedlessly on rational thought and extracts a tragic human cost.
The line between propaganda and information has blurred dangerously in America when the Trump administration hired Steve Bannon for a short time in the capacity of a White House strategist. Bannon was the former chairman of Breitbart News, a controversial far-right syndicated site not particularly well-known for its veracity.
President Donald Trump has also openly praised Alex Jones, a much reviled American radio show host and conspiracy theorist who has often described victims of school shootings as crisis actors and called the Sandy Hook school shooting as fake.
related news
Yes, that word again even though it was used to discredit the death of 20 pre-school children in what was in 2012, the deadliest mass shooting at either a high school or grade school and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in US history.
We will return to the far reaching impact of fake news on global political scenarios but first let us talk about the havoc created by the misinformation epidemic closer home.
The brazenly recorded and uploaded videos of lynchings have been blamed on a number of reasons but most recently on rumours of child kidnappings that have spread via WhatsApp.
This is of course only the tip of the fake news iceberg in India.
Many sites that could be termed as the Indian counterparts of Breitbart and Alex Jones' Infowars have routinely used doctored images and videos to spread fake news. From discrediting political leaders, to misreporting historical facts to promoting biases, the sites have done it all .
Even though it is hard for the followers of these sites to believe that the messages are false, fact-checking sites like AltNews are trying in their own way to combat the phenomenon of fake news. Pratik Sinha, the founder of Alt news, told the BBC in an interview and we quote, "Suddenly people from rural areas, in particular, are inundated with information and are unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. They tend to believe whatever is sent to them."
In a cruel twist of irony, one of the recent victims of lynching in the north-eastern state of Tripura was an anti-fake news campaigner employed by local government officials to go around villages and use a loudspeaker to convince locals do not believe in social media rumours.
Even though the spread of fake news in what is now being called by many observers as the post-truth and post-fact world, via sites, social media accounts and Twitter handles has gone unchecked, the government has now pulled up WhatsApp for its role in the recent events. The government has said and we quote, " the company cannot evade "accountability and responsibility" for the content its users are sharing." Unquote.
One reason for this could be that the spread of fake news via WhatsApp is immediate and far reaching.
Just consider this. There are more than one billion active mobile phone connections in India and for many users, the internet is equated only with the usage of WhatsApp.
The enormity of this problem is compounded by the fact that with over 200 million users, India is WhatsApp's biggest and most lucrative market. This has not just enabled the spread of damaging misinformation but also helped in the mobilisation of mobs.
Add to this the immediacy of the messaging system that makes people trust forwards that come from family groups or circles of friends and the number of those who sift fact from fiction becomes even more insignificant.
Technology analyst Prasanto K Roy told the BBC, that India will add its next 300 million internet users in the next three years.
This can be problematic if the literacy rate of users is low.
When the users are not educated, they are targetted with the use of videos many of which have contributed to the recent lynchings.
The video could be from a completely different context but with a little doctoring can inflame the internet and incite mob violence.
That WhatsApp is encrypted end to end, and only those communicating with each other can read a message, will make it tough for the messaging platform to stem the rot.
WhatsApp is alarmed at the way its services have been used to target random victims and is trying to understand how this challenge that requires government, civil society and technology companies to work together, can be addressed by only a messaging service like itself.
On July 4, Hindustan times reported that WhatsApp is chalking out measures to prevent the spread of false information. In its response to the government, Whatsapp stated and we quoted, “We’re horrified by these terrible acts of violence and wanted to respond quickly to the very important issues you have raised.”
We list some of the steps outlined by the messaging platform here:
The potential launch of a specific label to identify forwarded messages. And a system for preventing the spread of fake news and provocative texts in consultation with experts and law-enforcement agents.
Giving people the controls and information they need to stay safe and working proactively to prevent the misuse of the service. The company launched a new setting that enables administrators to decide who gets to send messages within the individual group. This, says Whatsapp, will help reduce the spread of unwanted messages in important group conversations, besides the forwarding of hoaxes and other content.
Running a long-term public safety ad campaign in India to spot and stem fake news and hoaxes .
Stronger privacy options, a tie up with local organisations to combat rumours, an engagement programme with law enforcement officials etc will also help.
Using machine-learning technology to identify spurious or troublemaking accounts.
Even before the recent upsurge in lynchings, WhatsApp had tied up with Boom Live – a fact-checking organisation – to curtail fake news ahead of the Karnataka elections in April.
And now a reward for fact checking warriors is in the offing
This Tuesday, the company announced WhatsApp Research Awards for Social Science and Misinformation in an effort to decode how online platforms are used to spread misinformation.
According to a Firstpost report, to tackle the recent spread of false and unverified news, WhatsApp, which is incidentally owned by Facebook is now set to commission a set of new global awards to invite researchers to participate and come up with solutions for tackling the fake news issue.
The company states that no WhatsApp data will be provided to award recipients and all the data from the award research efforts will be owned by the researcher solely.
According to the report, WhatsApp has taken 5 core areas that it wants to explore like election-related information, the spread of misinformation stemming from WhatsApp network and detection of problematic behaviour.
The WhatsApp Research Awards will act as a benefactor offering up to $50,000 per research proposal, reports Firstpost.
Also, the company would invite the award recipients to attend two workshops on how WhatsApp works and also encouraging them to share their research works with other awardees to collaborate and eliminate fake news from its roots.
The applications for applying to this award are due by 12 August.
That said, how can the dispersal of fake news be stemmed when its many sources remain unattended?
As, we stated in the beginning of the podcast, the spread of fake news on WhatsApp is symptomatic of a wider problem. In any case,
WhatsApp is protected under the Indian IT Act's Intermediary Guidelines, which basically specifies that messengers cannot be held accountable for messages. In other words, intermediary platforms cannot be held accountable for content shared on them. This freedom is however conditional and that is another story for another time.
The fact is that the undermining of mainstream media, the upsurge in propaganda websites and the division across social and economic lines are fertile grounds for the dissemination of false narratives.
And this problem as we said before is worldwide.
A former employee of London-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica has been widely reported as saying that the company absolutely planted fake news and used the personal data of 50 million Facebook members to influence the US presidential election in 2016.
How pervasive is fake news became evident when a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. The theory alluded to human trafficking and child abuse and connected several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party. Even though, this theory was debunked, the damage was done with millions believing in it and a man, Edgar Maddison Welch, actually driving to a restaurant with three guns to investigate widespread online reports of children held there in a child abuse scheme allegedly led by Hillary Clinton. The way Trump has constantly berated trusted news sources and planted the fake news ghost in American narratives does not help matters either.
The recent lynchings in India based on rumours connected to child lifting are eerily similar and apart from holding WhatsApp accountable, we need a systematic shift that respects free press, fact based reportage and a little introspection on the part of the creators and consumers of fake news.